Conventionally, data hiding refers to a process of hiding data into multimedia for communication or some other use. Such processes may also be advantageous for secure transmission of secret data. The data hiding process typically combines two different sets of data: 1) a set of the embedded data, and 2) another set of the cover media data. Further, in such processes, invisibility of hidden data and successful recovery of the hidden data is an important requirement. However, in the conventional process of data hiding, the cover media, such as a cover image, may experience some distortion due to embedding of the secret data through various layers. Moreover, the distorted cover image can also indicate that there is some information or secret images have been embedded into the cover image. Therefore, such data hiding process for communication may not be acceptable in some domains that require secure communications, such as the military, medical, and legal domains.
Further to the data hiding process, there is another challenge to accurately reconstruct or recover the hidden secret data from the embedded cover image once the cover image has been transmitted to the intended receiver. Conventionally, the steps of hiding the secret data behind a cover image and recovering the secret data from the cover image are collectively referred as Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) techniques. Thus, conventional RDH technique recovers the original image without any distortion or with permissible limit of distortion after the secret data has been extracted.
Since the RDH technique does not guarantee the security of secret data, this creates additional challenges relating to the security of secret data that is embedded as a secret data layer and hidden behind the cover image. In order to overcome these problems, conventional encryption techniques are used on the secret data to ensure that any unauthorized person or intruder fails to access the secret data. Unfortunately, data encrypted with a majority of the state-of-the-art encryption techniques can be easily decrypted using widely available bypass filters. Thus, the encryption of the secret data using standard encryption techniques is not a viable solution to implement in a highly secured mechanism.
There are some state-of-art techniques divulging the data security by the way of self-destruction of the sensitive data itself. However, conventional data destruction is a random mechanism and it does not assure retrieval of the original data. Therefore, there is no assurance of reconstruction of the original data back to the user. In one conventional technique, the sensitive data is destructed after a one-time use. In that sense, the security mechanism on the sensitive data is nowhere preserved or kept.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide methods and systems for multi-layer reversible data hiding that enables authentication of multiple layers sequentially for accessing the secret data hidden behind the cover media.
It may also be advantageous to preserve and protect the sensitive data immediately after sensing the presence of an intruder.
It may be additionally advantageous to retrieve the sensitive data to the user upon providing proper layer wise authentication.